Entertainment: Alton Brown brings his culinary variety show to Schenectady

Dinner Music

Alton Brown is a little like the They Might Be Giants of food television. Basically he’s got culinary geek chic down to an art. Or maybe a science. To make another musical comparison farther back in MTV history, Brown — the bespectacled boyish host and commentator from Iron Chef America, author of numerous books, and host of his own shows — is maybe more like Thomas Dolby of “She Blinded Me With Science” fame. Brown, perhaps more so than any other food TV celebrity, often deploys science — chemistry and physics as well as plant and animal biology — to explain the mechanics of cooking and flavor.

Brown, who is bringing his Alton Brown Live! Edible Inevitable Tour to Schenectady in February, answered some questions from EXPLORE not long ago, from Palm Desert, Calif., where he was preparing to start his tour.

Food television has launched or enhanced the careers of many celebrity chefs — think Nigella Lawson, Rachael Ray and Mario Batali. Reality TV cooking competitions have transformed high-stress kitchen scenarios into successful primetime series. But what could be the most unexpected permutation of the food-centric entertainment trend is the age of traveling culinary variety shows. The popularity of ABC’s The Chew — which features Batali and other food celebrities — has demonstrated that not only will American TV viewers eat up shows with accessible cooking instructions, but they’ll also tune in to programs where people merely talk about food. And now Brown’s show, following in the footsteps of Eric Ripert and Anthony Bourdain, who have turned a night of kitchen-centric repartee into a kind of theater, is the newest in line of culinary stand-up and performance. Upping the ante a little, Brown will be singing and playing songs about cooking and eating as part of the deal.

“It’s a culinary variety show complete with strange food demos of unusual size, puppets, and live food songs,” says Brown. “I sing and play guitars and might break out a saxophone before the night is over.”

For many of us, food is for eating. It’s not necessarily entertaining to watch people make it when we don’t get to enjoy it. But Brown is like the famous sportscaster Red Barber in that he takes something people wish to experience with one sense — fans want to see a ballgame, and food fanatics long to taste the stuff chefs make — and transforms it into a verbal experience. That’s not easy. Particularly with food. (If you’ve ever tried to describe crunchiness or saltiness without repeating yourself, you know what I mean.) Brown, who’s a master of conveying the sense of bustle in a hectic kitchen, or of explaining what a technique such as searing does to a piece of meat, points to the difficulty of “describing heat” as one of his recurring challenges.

But Brown, who got his start in music videos (he did one for R.E.M.!) and cinematography, is a multimedia kind of guy, and so the cross-platform logic of his career makes sense. He’s that rare guy who can seem super smart and funny, and who can still make things approachable for regular folks. He’s tasted a lot of food over the years, and cooked a lot too. On Iron Chef America, Brown has hovered over chefs taking unusual ingredients and working against the clock. He’s seen all kinds of crazy techniques. He’s seen expert chefs blow it. He’s seen perfect pieces of fish botched by strained attempts at fanciness. And Brown is a reliable voice of reason. If he spies someone making questionable use of yucca root, for instance, he’ll let the viewers know.

When asked about the mistakes that even world-class chefs make, Brown says that sometimes culinary wizards can undermine all their creativity by using “not enough salt.” And he’s not a big fan of “inedible garnishes” either. Despite his scientific bent, Brown is also a champion of the straight-ahead and simple in the kitchen. I asked him what food or cooking trend he thought was most overrated and he said “sous vide” (the popular technique of cooking meats using vacuum-sealed bags in carefully calibrated warm-water baths to insure even temperatures). “Hands down,” says Brown.

Having hosted shows about food, written books about cooking, and traveled the country eating all kinds of deliciousness, Brown has a pretty good sense of what kind of culinary obsessions are popping up and taking hold around America. And says the locavore ethos is not going away.

“The local trend is the biggest movement in the U.S., culinary-wise,” says

Brown. “I also think more and more people are going to be going out of their way to take culinary classes specific to particular foods and cuisines.”

But if you’re just getting started on your culinary education — if you don’t know sous vide from V-8 juice, and if you don’t have much interest in skinning small critters — Brown still has some tips for the humble cook at home who just wants to improve his or her game a bit.

“Learn to cook eggs,” he says. “Everything else will come into place. Oh, and learn to season, meaning learn when and how to salt your food during cooking.”

Brown assured us that he cooks “darn tasty stuff” for his family at home, but he also said that the standard items you’ll find in his refrigerator are “always: hummus, clarified butter, lard and tonic water.” That’s a list that conjures some peculiar combinations.

Adding to the mad-scientist/southern-gentleman image that Brown often conveys, he says that his all-time favorite cookbook is “The 1962 edition of The Joy of Cooking … because it’s got diagrams of how to skin a squirrel.”

Whether Brown’s fans can expect any squirrel-skinning at his show is doubtful, but perhaps a song about it. At any rate, he’s promised some extreme food experimentation as part of the show, and those in the front rows will be given ponchos to protect them from any of the mess that might be flying.